1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to communication of and about electronic document forms of statements and reports, and more particularly to providing such documents by e-mail with integrated capability to respond by instant messaging or chat session.
2. Background Art
Conventionally, documents used as statements and reports (collectively “statements” herein) are prepared on paper and include data stating like monthly billings, lab results, etc. Such statements are prepared by enterprises acting as vendors of goods or services, or by organizations that need to regularly communicate with their clients on standard matters. Conversely, the statements are intended for other enterprises or organizations acting as goods or services customers, or as clients that receive regular, detail intensive communications on standard matters.
Of particular present interest are how statements are then sent from the preparing parties to the receiving parties, and then how these parties handle follow up communications. Traditionally, the statements are sent via a conventional postal or courier service. Of course, as is well known, this is a notoriously slow, serial, and is an expensive process, and it becomes particularly so whenever a receiving party has to follow up with a providing party on details or issues in the statement. That very common situation may require drafting a letter and sending it by mail or courier back to the providing party. Alternately, the receiving party can try to reach the providing party by telephone, with a high attendant likelihood that the provider's best suited representative for handling the matter will be unavailable, or not have a copy of the statement or other information readily available to address the questions being raised.
Despite the advent and growing availability of e-mail, simple follow up transactions regarding statements can still take days. In fact, trying to follow up via e-mail can be worse, since it tends to be addressed to individuals rather than to roles or departments, i.e., not to entities like an Accounting Clerk or a Dept. Thus, even if an original statement includes a contact e-mail address, it may be for a person who is on vacation, or who has left the organization, or who has such a work load that it is days before they can sort through their e-mail and delegate matters.
For example, if a conventional statement is a bill in which merely one item requires clarification, resolving that is likely to require a protracted dialog that can be expected to substantially delay payment. Pragmatically, it is the very nature of the information in statements to require such clarification or correction and, continuing with billing as just our example, that is why enterprises and organizations today are still compelled to set payment terms of at least 30 days, and to then often see considerable delay beyond that despite whatever early payment incentives they may provide.
Another example of a problem for statement providers is the cost of fielding telesales support. Supporting customers via phone is a notoriously expensive proposition. These calls are measured in time and most of the time spent on the phone is merely navigating to the “right” representative and then getting the basic information from the client such that both parties are talking about the same thing, i.e., establishing the same context. Efforts to date to migrate such support to e-mail has also, by in large, been a failure. When a customer has a problem they usually want to handle it immediately, or at least in a relatively short time period. An aspect of the problem here is that there presently is no assurance that an e-mail will be responded to, in short order or ever. Even when providers implement e-mail support that is highly responsive, they often find that their customers still opt to communicate by telephone.
It follows that what is needed is an improved system to communicate statements and to then conduct further communications about them.